Exploring Research in Visual Arts

Welcome to Theories and Problems in Visual Art. This is Concepts Lecture 15 on Research. I'm going to talk a bit about research in an art school, in art schools in general, and then I'm going to explore the question about artistic research and scientific research and whether or not they're related. And the last part of this lecture is about some alternative ways of trying to understand what it means to say that you could do research in art. In some parts of the world, and especially in the UK and Australia, and especially in advanced levels of art instruction like the MFA and the PhD, research is one of the key words in art instruction. The other is knowledge, which I'll talk about in a moment. the next lecture. The two of them go hand in hand. Students are expected to develop research methodologies and to be able to describe their work as research. Whenever there are research programs in these advanced levels of art instruction, the students are asked to do research in order to produce knowledge. So these two words are usually inseparable. Here at the School of the Art Institute we use research as part of research studio one and contemporary practices in the first year and there it is at the top there practice and research making of individual studio work and developing individual research to support and connect that work to a larger creative community. And here are some of the research methodologies that are used at Research Studio as of 2020. In boldface, observe, search, record, form and transfer. transform, create, and situate. In other institutions, and especially at higher levels, these boldface concepts here can become quite complex. They get very systematized. There's more literature on each one of them. So the question is, at first, is this artistic research anything like scientific research? Scientific research is the model for any kind of research. Here are some of the elements that usually go into scientific research. First of all, there's usually a defined list of research methods. There's usually also a description of what will count as evidence, what's being studied. And then when it comes to writing up the research, the papers are divided into conventional sections with headers like methods, materials, results, and some other conventional sections. So there's a kind of uniformity to scientific research that depends on elements like this. So is artistic research that happens in art schools and art departments anything like that kind of scientific research? This is very widely debated, and you could put the answer schematically in this way. The first position would be artistic research. can utilize scientific research methodologies and forms, even though artistic research is fundamentally distinct from scientific research. Second position, artistic research needs to rethink scientific research methodology informs because it's fundamentally distinct from scientific research. And the third position would be artistic research cannot use scientific research methodologies because it is fundamentally distinct from scientific research. Here's the same idea as a diagram from a book called Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, which is a good one to look at if you want to explore this subject. It's a kind of a Venn diagram where at the top... artistic research is fundamentally different from other fields and then maybe they're blended and at the bottom maybe they're the same or there's a hybrid of them so this is the same kind of thing as what I was saying with the set of three choices in the last slide Here's an example of the idea that artistic research cannot use scientific research. Soren Kuropp, he's one of the people who lectures on this subject, says, quote, there is no scientific research to which artistic research might have to comply. Artistic research should be left alone to develop its own methods. Well, if that's the case and artistic research is really an independent thing, then there's also the further question of whether or not it should be defined at all because maybe artistic research is another way of describing the general activities of making and meaning. meaning and that it doesn't need to be systematized or defined. You could say that artistic research should be defined because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to call it research. If you're not going to define it at all, then you could just drop the word research. You could also say though that artistic research shouldn't be defined because art has an intrinsic openness and freedom. Which is either the result of the fact that it's visual or it's free within cultures and institutions, so it shouldn't be defined for that reason. And there are opinions on both sides of this as well. I'll give you some examples. Henk Slager is a Dutch educator, researcher, and writer. He wrote this book called The Pleasure of Research. It's a good example of the second idea I had on the last screen. that artistic research shouldn't be defined because artistic activity is a space of freedom that's outside of the constraints of more methodologically involved enterprises like science. Slager says research has, quote, no need to be led by the formatted models of the established scientific order. This will be a form of research not swayed by issues dictated by the late capitalist free market system or its knowledge commodification. This will be an authentic research that comes about through an artistic necessity. And he has an interesting passage in this book in which he talks about the alpha, beta, and gamma sciences, which is a useful way of thinking about this whole question. Many artistic research projects seem to thwart the well-defined disciplines. So artistic research he's talking about here. It knows the hermeneutic questions of the humanities, the alpha sciences. It's engaged in empirically scientific methods, the beta sciences, and it's aware of commitment, the gamma sciences. So let me just tease that apart for a second. He's saying that artistic research is aware of and also engaged with these three other what he calls sciences. Alpha sciences would be the humanities. Hermeneutic questions means questions of interpretation, so basically what you do in literature and humanities classes. Artistic research is engaged with these alpha sciences of the humanities that interpret artworks. Artistic research is also engaged with empirical scientific methods, sciences, beta sciences he calls them. And artistic research is also aware of commitment, which he associates with gamma sciences. And here he's talking about social sciences, which have social commitments and interests of various sorts. Artistic research points, though, he says, to a delta science, a fourth kind of science, which is characterized by a, quote, capacity to continuously engage in novel, unexpected epistemological relations in a methodological process of interkind. connectivity, which is another way of saying that artistic research points towards something entirely new, which depends on its freedom and at the same time its engagement with these three existing quote unquote sciences, alpha, beta, and beta. and gamma sciences. It's interesting to think about sciences in this way, as alpha, beta, and gamma, and it is also interesting to think of artistic research and artists in general as being engaged with the humanities and the sciences and the social sciences. It's a little harder to understand exactly what could be possible with this fourth science, but that's part of the idea. The notion is that if you can situate your work in an art school or in the art world, you can find yourself the art that you want to be. these spaces of freedom where you can look into the possibility of a fourth science, you might say. Okay, I'm going to spend the rest of the time on some alternatives to these questions that were proposed by Sir Christopher Frayling. There he is. He's the principal theorist of art research, starting way back in the 19th century. of the 70s, he was writing about this, and he's proposed a couple different ways of thinking about what art research means. He developed his ideas by elaborating on some texts by the English art historian Herbert Reed of of an earlier generation, died in 1968. And he produced a table, Frayling did, which incorporates his own ideas and Herbert Reid's ideas. And here is the table, and then I'm gonna look at some of these categories in some more detail. So on the left, you have the form of research. Research to art, research through art, research into art, research for art, and research in art. These are completely impossible to memorize, at least for me. I've been over and over them a number of different times and in different events and conferences and so on and they're really, really hard to memorize. But the idea behind them is actually very simple, interesting. So starting at the top, research to art is something defined by Herbert Reid and Frayling says that means education for the professional artist including techniques and materials. This is not, it's not problematic and maybe it's not especially interesting. This would be when you learn, you know, digital video editing techniques or you're learning a certain software algorithms, things like that, your coding, anything that has to do with techniques and materials, digital or... otherwise is something that Frayling calls research to art. So it's not counterintuitive or anything like that to say that when you're learning a program. or a new medium that you're doing research, that's okay. It's just that it's not the interesting problematic category. Next up, research through art. So Herbert Reed has a definition, which I'm just going to skip because I'm concentrating here on Frayling. So in the row, research through art, over on the right, right-hand column, Frayling's definition is research through art means research in the field of art and design. Okay. He says this is uppercase research, systematic disciplinary inquiry. So this includes design research, which is a subject of another concepts lecture, and anything else that is systematic in that way. The third row, research into art, Fraling says that would be like art history. You're researching into art if you're reading about a certain artist or a practice. Possibly also he includes aesthetics. Okay, so that leaves... the interesting one, research for art. Research for art he defines as research leading to the production of art so that the art embodies the thinking. This is lowercase research, non-professional searching. So I'm going to expand on this in the next screen and see if I can shed some light on the different parts of this claim. But before I go to the next screen, I just want to say there's an extra preposition if anyone wanted to use it. No one has used research in art yet, so you can invent something for that if you wanted to. So Frayling's principal category in a bit more detail. This is research for art. And I've divided this into three different meanings that are all in Frayling, but he doesn't distinguish them quite in this way. So research for art. First of all, that could mean research that leads to the production of art. That's relatively unproblematic, but if you're only talking about research that leads to the production of your art, like you're looking up stuff on Wikipedia in order to get something right for what you're doing, that would be unproblematic and it would make this category about the same as research through art on the previous screen, which would be uppercase research. Second would be research that leads to art that embodies the research, as Frayling says. And this is the central and problematic possibility, and I'm going to expand on it in the next slide. But then first, down below, you could also say, or Frayling also implies, that research for art is lowercase research or searching. Those are Frayling's terms. So this implies that the research is free of strict research methodology, but it leaves it open how such lowercase research might be characterized. It's just something that he doesn't talk more about. It's a little bit like Hengst Lager's kind of freedom, freer kind of research, it would include this. Okay, but so again, the problematic one is right in the middle there. So to expand on that... People have been trying to understand what that means, what research for art means in that sense, since the 1970s. If your research is embodied in the art that you make, then what's the difference between the research itself, your internet searches, your notes, the objects you collect, whatever it is, what's the difference between them and the artwork you produce? So a scientist, for example, would not say that their research is embodied in their scientific discoveries or conclusions, but the research preceded them and informed them and supported those conclusions. But the claim here is that as an artist you would do research for your work, but then the research itself ends up being embodied in the work. That's what makes this hard to understand. And that's why people have been struggling to understand this for 50 years now. now. In science, research produces knowledge, which I'll talk about in the next lecture, and so then maybe the artwork is a kind of knowledge, something for the next lecture. So this is a problem, this is like a tip of the iceberg kind of a moment for this problem, because if you feel like you're doing artistic research in this way, then you are facing right into a kind of a paradox, because you are wanting to... have the research which is usually an ingredient of and a predecessor for the final result, you're wanting to have that actually also be the final result. A lot of artists work this way and think this way, and especially in these higher level programs in the UK and elsewhere where research is very systematically taught at the MFA and the PhD level, especially there, there is a lot of interest in this idea that artistic research is the principle. way that artists make art in the 21st century and that the most interesting thing that can happen is not that you have a mass of notes and then produce an artwork but that your mass of notes essentially is the artwork or vice versa so that the art actually is the research itself hanging and placed in the gallery as research. Not an idea that anyone fully understands and possibly it's not an idea that actually can be fully understood.

The other is knowledge, which I'll talk about in a moment. the next lecture. The two of them go hand in hand.

Students are expected to develop research methodologies and to be able to describe their work as research. Whenever there are research programs in these advanced levels of art instruction, the students are asked to do research in order to produce knowledge. So these two words are usually inseparable.

Here at the School of the Art Institute we use research as part of research studio one and contemporary practices in the first year and there it is at the top there practice and research making of individual studio work and developing individual research to support and connect that work to a larger creative community. And here are some of the research methodologies that are used at Research Studio as of 2020. In boldface, observe, search, record, form and transfer. transform, create, and situate.

In other institutions, and especially at higher levels, these boldface concepts here can become quite complex. They get very systematized. There's more literature on each one of them.

So the question is, at first, is this artistic research anything like scientific research? Scientific research is the model for any kind of research. Here are some of the elements that usually go into scientific research. First of all, there's usually a defined list of research methods.

There's usually also a description of what will count as evidence, what's being studied. And then when it comes to writing up the research, the papers are divided into conventional sections with headers like methods, materials, results, and some other conventional sections. So there's a kind of uniformity to scientific research that depends on elements like this.

So is artistic research that happens in art schools and art departments anything like that kind of scientific research? This is very widely debated, and you could put the answer schematically in this way. The first position would be artistic research.

can utilize scientific research methodologies and forms, even though artistic research is fundamentally distinct from scientific research. Second position, artistic research needs to rethink scientific research methodology informs because it's fundamentally distinct from scientific research. And the third position would be artistic research cannot use scientific research methodologies because it is fundamentally distinct from scientific research. Here's the same idea as a diagram from a book called Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, which is a good one to look at if you want to explore this subject. It's a kind of a Venn diagram where at the top...

artistic research is fundamentally different from other fields and then maybe they're blended and at the bottom maybe they're the same or there's a hybrid of them so this is the same kind of thing as what I was saying with the set of three choices in the last slide Here's an example of the idea that artistic research cannot use scientific research. Soren Kuropp, he's one of the people who lectures on this subject, says, quote, there is no scientific research to which artistic research might have to comply. Artistic research should be left alone to develop its own methods.

Well, if that's the case and artistic research is really an independent thing, then there's also the further question of whether or not it should be defined at all because maybe artistic research is another way of describing the general activities of making and meaning. meaning and that it doesn't need to be systematized or defined. You could say that artistic research should be defined because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to call it research.

If you're not going to define it at all, then you could just drop the word research. You could also say though that artistic research shouldn't be defined because art has an intrinsic openness and freedom. Which is either the result of the fact that it's visual or it's free within cultures and institutions, so it shouldn't be defined for that reason.

And there are opinions on both sides of this as well. I'll give you some examples. Henk Slager is a Dutch educator, researcher, and writer.

He wrote this book called The Pleasure of Research. It's a good example of the second idea I had on the last screen. that artistic research shouldn't be defined because artistic activity is a space of freedom that's outside of the constraints of more methodologically involved enterprises like science. Slager says research has, quote, no need to be led by the formatted models of the established scientific order. This will be a form of research not swayed by issues dictated by the late capitalist free market system or its knowledge commodification.

This will be an authentic research that comes about through an artistic necessity. And he has an interesting passage in this book in which he talks about the alpha, beta, and gamma sciences, which is a useful way of thinking about this whole question. Many artistic research projects seem to thwart the well-defined disciplines.

So artistic research he's talking about here. It knows the hermeneutic questions of the humanities, the alpha sciences. It's engaged in empirically scientific methods, the beta sciences, and it's aware of commitment, the gamma sciences.

So let me just tease that apart for a second. He's saying that artistic research is aware of and also engaged with these three other what he calls sciences. Alpha sciences would be the humanities.

Hermeneutic questions means questions of interpretation, so basically what you do in literature and humanities classes. Artistic research is engaged with these alpha sciences of the humanities that interpret artworks. Artistic research is also engaged with empirical scientific methods, sciences, beta sciences he calls them. And artistic research is also aware of commitment, which he associates with gamma sciences. And here he's talking about social sciences, which have social commitments and interests of various sorts.

Artistic research points, though, he says, to a delta science, a fourth kind of science, which is characterized by a, quote, capacity to continuously engage in novel, unexpected epistemological relations in a methodological process of interkind. connectivity, which is another way of saying that artistic research points towards something entirely new, which depends on its freedom and at the same time its engagement with these three existing quote unquote sciences, alpha, beta, and beta. and gamma sciences. It's interesting to think about sciences in this way, as alpha, beta, and gamma, and it is also interesting to think of artistic research and artists in general as being engaged with the humanities and the sciences and the social sciences.

It's a little harder to understand exactly what could be possible with this fourth science, but that's part of the idea. The notion is that if you can situate your work in an art school or in the art world, you can find yourself the art that you want to be. these spaces of freedom where you can look into the possibility of a fourth science, you might say.

Okay, I'm going to spend the rest of the time on some alternatives to these questions that were proposed by Sir Christopher Frayling. There he is. He's the principal theorist of art research, starting way back in the 19th century. of the 70s, he was writing about this, and he's proposed a couple different ways of thinking about what art research means.

He developed his ideas by elaborating on some texts by the English art historian Herbert Reed of of an earlier generation, died in 1968. And he produced a table, Frayling did, which incorporates his own ideas and Herbert Reid's ideas. And here is the table, and then I'm gonna look at some of these categories in some more detail. So on the left, you have the form of research.

Research to art, research through art, research into art, research for art, and research in art. These are completely impossible to memorize, at least for me. I've been over and over them a number of different times and in different events and conferences and so on and they're really, really hard to memorize. But the idea behind them is actually very simple, interesting.

So starting at the top, research to art is something defined by Herbert Reid and Frayling says that means education for the professional artist including techniques and materials. This is not, it's not problematic and maybe it's not especially interesting. This would be when you learn, you know, digital video editing techniques or you're learning a certain software algorithms, things like that, your coding, anything that has to do with techniques and materials, digital or... otherwise is something that Frayling calls research to art. So it's not counterintuitive or anything like that to say that when you're learning a program.

or a new medium that you're doing research, that's okay. It's just that it's not the interesting problematic category. Next up, research through art.

So Herbert Reed has a definition, which I'm just going to skip because I'm concentrating here on Frayling. So in the row, research through art, over on the right, right-hand column, Frayling's definition is research through art means research in the field of art and design. Okay. He says this is uppercase research, systematic disciplinary inquiry.

So this includes design research, which is a subject of another concepts lecture, and anything else that is systematic in that way. The third row, research into art, Fraling says that would be like art history. You're researching into art if you're reading about a certain artist or a practice.

Possibly also he includes aesthetics. Okay, so that leaves... the interesting one, research for art.

Research for art he defines as research leading to the production of art so that the art embodies the thinking. This is lowercase research, non-professional searching. So I'm going to expand on this in the next screen and see if I can shed some light on the different parts of this claim.

But before I go to the next screen, I just want to say there's an extra preposition if anyone wanted to use it. No one has used research in art yet, so you can invent something for that if you wanted to. So Frayling's principal category in a bit more detail.

This is research for art. And I've divided this into three different meanings that are all in Frayling, but he doesn't distinguish them quite in this way. So research for art.

First of all, that could mean research that leads to the production of art. That's relatively unproblematic, but if you're only talking about research that leads to the production of your art, like you're looking up stuff on Wikipedia in order to get something right for what you're doing, that would be unproblematic and it would make this category about the same as research through art on the previous screen, which would be uppercase research. Second would be research that leads to art that embodies the research, as Frayling says.

And this is the central and problematic possibility, and I'm going to expand on it in the next slide. But then first, down below, you could also say, or Frayling also implies, that research for art is lowercase research or searching. Those are Frayling's terms. So this implies that the research is free of strict research methodology, but it leaves it open how such lowercase research might be characterized.

It's just something that he doesn't talk more about. It's a little bit like Hengst Lager's kind of freedom, freer kind of research, it would include this. Okay, but so again, the problematic one is right in the middle there.

So to expand on that... People have been trying to understand what that means, what research for art means in that sense, since the 1970s. If your research is embodied in the art that you make, then what's the difference between the research itself, your internet searches, your notes, the objects you collect, whatever it is, what's the difference between them and the artwork you produce? So a scientist, for example, would not say that their research is embodied in their scientific discoveries or conclusions, but the research preceded them and informed them and supported those conclusions. But the claim here is that as an artist you would do research for your work, but then the research itself ends up being embodied in the work.

That's what makes this hard to understand. And that's why people have been struggling to understand this for 50 years now. now. In science, research produces knowledge, which I'll talk about in the next lecture, and so then maybe the artwork is a kind of knowledge, something for the next lecture. So this is a problem, this is like a tip of the iceberg kind of a moment for this problem, because if you feel like you're doing artistic research in this way, then you are facing right into a kind of a paradox, because you are wanting to...

have the research which is usually an ingredient of and a predecessor for the final result, you're wanting to have that actually also be the final result. A lot of artists work this way and think this way, and especially in these higher level programs in the UK and elsewhere where research is very systematically taught at the MFA and the PhD level, especially there, there is a lot of interest in this idea that artistic research is the principle. way that artists make art in the 21st century and that the most interesting thing that can happen is not that you have a mass of notes and then produce an artwork but that your mass of notes essentially is the artwork or vice versa so that the art actually is the research itself hanging and placed in the gallery as research. Not an idea that anyone fully understands and possibly it's not an idea that actually can be fully understood.

Transcript for:Exploring Research in Visual Arts

Transcript for:
Exploring Research in Visual Arts